Bach in the Summer
Summer is a forced austerity practice. The intensity of the heat reduces one’s ambitions down to their most basic form. Days take on a spareness: eat, sleep, work. Flung are all the lofty plans and dreams and wishes for the season. My housekeeping standards fall dangerously low: can I keep the garden and the cats (and Matt) alive? I practice survival. I practice Bach.
I return to Bach in between all big musical projects and performances. He's a sort of musical chiropractic adjustment after the dissonance of modern music or the intensity of Romantic programs have wobbled my discipline and jumbled my ears. Bach’s two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier—a collection of Preludes and Fugues in all 24 major and minor keys—are a sort of keyboardist’s Bible, a place to reorient myself at the piano and to sharpen my listening skills once again. Bach forces austerity: Gone are the crutches we rely on in later music—the long sweeping pedal effects of Debussy, the complicated harmonic progressions of Brahms, the heart-wrenchingly beautiful melodies of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov. Instead, practicing Bach whittles one’s musicianship down to its core and to the essential foundations of rhythm, harmony and line. He leaves no room for error.
Coming back to Bach over and over again reminds me that the discipline of practice is my work. Most of the time, I practice for this gig and for that concert. I practice in preparation for this rehearsal or for that program. Performance-based practice is goal-oriented: I must learn this music by this time. It is a to-do list with a deadline. This kind of practicing is my job, my career, my profession.
But time-based practice is something else entirely. It suggests that the work is the practice, that showing up is the point, that there is meaning in the doing. It is Bach without a concert date. It is the held space of a kitchen timer or the monk with the clock in zazen. Sitting down with Bach’s B-major Prelude and Fugue after months of recitals resets my intentions: Practice becomes time-based, not task-based, again.
Bach is a mental game as much as a physical challenge. Music like the Preludes and Fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier takes constant assessment, daily reevaluation and alignment. As soon as I think I have settled upon a practice schedule—the Prelude needs rhythms and metronome work for the next week; the Fugue only metronome hands separately—I must tweak the plan. Oops. The prelude needs more work with separate hands. I should alternate slow/fast practices with the prelude as well. The fugue needs super slo-mo and backwards choo-choo. It’s a bit like gardening; the work is never done. Weeds constantly appear and must be dealt with before they overtake the whole flowerbed, choking the roses, strangling the cosmos and the daises.
Pianists talk about certain pieces as being “pianistic,” referring to the magical alignment where the shape of the keyboard and the shape of the hands are in perfect agreement. Nothing Bach wrote is even remotely pianistic. He would not have even known to care about such things, and this has nothing to do with the fact that Bach was writing for keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord and the clavichord and not the modern piano. Composers in the Baroque period were more concerned with the independence of individual musical lines, not how well they might fit under the hand. In other words, each hand is treated equally and independently, rather than one hand being an accompaniment figure (and therefore somewhat subservient) to the other. Playing Bach is like walking on a tightrope for miles. I steady myself over and over, find my footing, regain balance for a precious split second, and then it’s gone.
It doesn’t matter that I have been playing the piano for forty years. My left hand is not as nimble as my right and struggles to meet the demands this kind of music requires of it. Regardless of how creative or clever the fingering, I can never solve all the awkward transitions and leaps. The key is to embrace the awkwardness, to know exactly where every clumsy spot is located and to make friends. Or at least learn how to bow gracefully, acknowledging its presence.
While other composers and music are more forgiving, even the tiniest lapse in concentration is deadly with Bach. No amount of practicing ever allows me to relax and let autopilot take over. Seemingly without warning, from time to time my brain seizes up as I play, much like a radio station momentarily hitting static, which, in turn, then causes my fingers to trip and stumble. It’s not just my mind that spontaneously freezes when I play Bach; my body clenches and tenses up as well. My shoulders tighten, my leg muscles spasm, my feet claw at the floor as though hanging on for dear life. None of this helps the music, by the way.
Quite simply, Bach is dangerous. Blink, and it’s over. Or so it feels like.
Part of what makes Bach feel precarious is that I play without any damper pedal whatsoever. Much of the time, I think of the damper pedal as my best friend. Pressing the sustaining pedal with the right foot raises the dampers off the strings, allowing them to vibrate freely. Lifting the pedal up and down clears the accumulation of sound that builds up between pedal changes. Pedaling creates the illusion that one note is connected to another, no gaps in the sound, legato achieved. On a percussion instrument like the piano—the hammers literally hit the strings—legato is a magician’s trick. Look! No hands!
But under a skilled foot, there are dozens of variations on this theme; it’s not just on and off the gas pedal. Pushing the damper pedal down only halfway to the bottom—“half pedaling” we call it—minimizes the sustaining effect subtly. Instead of the sound being drowned in a blanket of overtones, one chord washing into another, half-pedaling gives the piano a lovely sheen—a shimmer, a bit of bling—but it keeps the blur from overtaking the clarity of the individual notes. Engaging the pedal ever so slightly—maybe a quarter down or even less—lifts the dampers just enough to give the sound a little extra ring, the pianist’s version of the vibrato that is otherwise beyond our instrument’s grasp. “Flutter pedaling” is the almost imperceptible movement of the right foot, shaking out just enough of the previously sustaining harmonies to prevent the sound from becoming messy. It’s a quick dusting, not a spring cleaning.
With the damper pedal underfoot, one minute a pianist can be Monet. The blue fades into the red, the yellow becomes green; there's no clear distinction between color, no obvious boundary between one sound and another. The next, Picasso—On! Off! On! Off!—the different combinations of sounds defined by sharp edges and a black border so no color bleeds into its neighbor.
The use of the sustaining pedal is controversial when playing Bach. Purists maintain that using the pedal is an insult to the Baroque style, as instruments of the time did not have such a device. And it is true that it allows pianists to maintain the pretense that they can sustain a more legato line than they could without this helpful tool. Without the pedal, there is no way to avoid gaps in the angular musical lines, empty spaces and silences between harmonies and phrases. This can be unsettling to modern ears, accustomed to our habit of filling every available nook and cranny of our world with sound (Thank you, Muzak!). Gaps make us nervous. Silence is unsettling. Rests between musical phrases and sections feel exposed.
The non-purists—or perhaps they are simply the more practical musicians?—argue that Bach on the modern piano is already an anachronism, might as well take advantage of all the instrument’s possibilities. When I teach students to play with a legato articulation I talk about connecting the notes from one finger to another like they were all on a long string. Playing Bach with pedal gives the pianist a whole ball of yarn to play with: we can connect this top line with that middle one, tie that big left-hand leap between notes together with a nice bow, knit that descending chord progression together as if we had seventeen fingers on each hand instead of five. Magic.
One could spend a lifetime studying the rules and restrictions of Baroque performance practices—All trills begin on the upper note. Leaps of more than a 6th should be played non-legato. Trills that are preceded by the upper note should begin on the principal note. Bass lines that move in step-wise motion should be played legato, except when they should be played staccato. Trills that are preceded by the lower note should begin with an upper auxiliary note if the performer is wearing purple polka-dotted socks—only to run the risk of making music that is perfect, but lifeless. But regardless of where one comes down on the pedaling question, music written in the Baroque era was generally intended to be less legato and more detached in articulation than music that came later. It’s like the staccato of an old-fashioned typewriter, trotting noisily along. One can almost hear the horses going by in the music of Bach’s time, the carriages rattling down the cobblestone streets.
My choice not to use the pedal when playing Bach is more an exercise, an experiment in extreme discipline, not really a statement of my Baroque performance practice preferences one way or another. Repeatedly, I find that taking away the pedal requires me to make some decisions about fingering and articulations that I otherwise might avoid, the pedal, or rather the lack thereof, becoming a sort of teacher. Subtracting the pedal from the equation removed the safe sound cover I rather enjoy crouching behind. Without the pedal, there is nowhere to hide; all my musical sins are bared for everyone to see: Look at that smudgy passagework, that unfocused voicing, that sloppy articulation! There is a reason pedal-less playing is called “dry” or secco. Imagine Bach in a desert, no water for miles. If Bach were a season, he'd be the height of summer, the intensity of the high-altitude sun, the scorching heat demanding simplicity and survival.
Perhaps what is most interesting about playing without the damper pedal is how uncomfortable it makes me physically. Taking away the pedal asks us to consider, what can we live without? a question designed to make us squirm regardless of the circumstances. Without the pedal, I feel strangely naked. I have spent four decades with my foot resting on the piano’s gas pedal, now my right foot has nowhere to go, no place to be. I catch my toes crawling over to the pedal again and again when I’m practicing, like a nervous tic. Suddenly I have great compassion for my beginning students, who have yet to learn to use the pedal. They should, according to my instructions, sit with their feet flat on the ground. If they can’t reach the ground, we raise the floor with a pile of books, but either way, feet flat. I feel strongly about this, convinced that our best sound starts with our feet firmly planted on the ground. This may be more symbolic than anything, this idea that we must be centered in order to find our musical voice, but nevertheless I believe it, and so every day I nag and fuss and remind students to plant their restless feet. Where are your feet? I say twenty-five times a day. Feet! I snap, after my repeated requests go ignored. It’s not that students are actively disobeying, it is just that their (my!) feet wander. In the middle of the prelude, I find myself crossing my legs, a big no-no in proper piano posture. I simply cannot keep my feet from wiggling, from trying to find something—anything—to do. Once again, truth emerges: moving is easy. Staying still, very hard.
Instead of practicing for speed and agility, both of which need work, honestly, Monday morning I played through the twenty-third prelude and fugue slowly, stopping and pausing frequently and sinking down into the chords and cadences as though I had all the time in the world. I practiced releasing the tension in my jaw. I practiced scanning my body for odd, funny ticks or involuntary responses: cocking my head to the right during a particularly gnarly passage in the fugue, curling my toes in my shoes during the headlong prelude. I breathed through the uncomfortable gaps in sound, rather than reaching for the pedal to bridge the silence. This kind of slow, meditative practicing was soothing, a counterbalance not only to my often hurried, harried life, but an antidote to my topsy-turvy inner state as well. Such mindful and attentive work also builds mental stamina and concentration, something I sorely need in the Bach. It’s like the sprinter’s long weekend runs, as opposed to practices consisting of multiple sets of short dashes.
In spite of all the challenges inherent in Bach, there is no other music I’d rather practice. I am not alone in my bias. Madeleine L’Engle, author of the beloved classic A Wrinkle in Time, often escaped the demands of life and family with a quiet hour practicing Bach. “You need to go practice,” her children would tell her when she was irritable. Pablo Casals, the famous cellist, said, “For the past eighty years, I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.”
It is a sort of benediction on the house. I love that. And in these scorching, secco days of summer, the essential reveals itself. The work is the practice. The practice, the work.